For engineers across the country, the Oracle job cuts served as a rude reminder of what the AI era has in store for the tech world.
It began early morning on Wednesday for thousands of Oracle employees in India.
The Austin-headquartered tech firm's India employees took a big hit with reportedly around 12,000 waking up to find termination letters in their inboxes.
Company sources, however, indicated the number was much lower (around 2,500 to 3,000) in India.
Globally, 30,000 are estimated to have got the pink slip.
The total headcount in India is 50,000.
Many in the organisation saw it coming.
"While the mood is certainly depressing within the company, many were anticipating this," a source, who was spared the axe, told Business Standard.
This employee pointed to an internal communication signalling a strategic shift underway at Oracle.
"An internal circular talked about broader organisational change and the need to streamline operations, making certain legacy roles redundant as the company pivots away from traditional enterprise software toward AI-ready services."
For engineers across the country, the Oracle job cuts served as a rude reminder of what the AI (artificial intelligence) era has in store for the tech world.
Ever since the early morning jolt on April 1, opinions have flooded social media platforms such as X, Reddit, Grapevine, LinkedIn and others.
The world's largest database firm, Oracle, may go for further rounds of layoffs.
"This will impact units across various business verticals. Every team will see people going," said a source in the know.
Earlier this year, analysts at investment bank TD Cowen had predicted that Oracle would be laying off as many as 30,000 employees.
The report has suggested that this lay off and sale of a health tech unit will free up $8 billion to $10 billion in free cash flow.
In India, last year too, the tech giant had laid off some employees.
Various media outlets had suggested then that the number was around 10 per cent and impacted the cloud unit.
Analysts highlighted that, for Oracle, this is due to Chairman Larry Ellison's focus on building out data centres to power AI workloads.
The company is raising a total of $50 billion to build additional capacity to meet the contracted demand from some of its largest Oracle Cloud Infrastructure customers, including AMD, Meta, NVIDIA, OpenAI, TikTok, xAI and others.
As of April 2026, the company has raised $30 billion through a combination of bonds and preferred stocks.
For Oracle, the third quarter of FY26 was one of the best quarters.
The organic total revenue growth was up 20 per cent.
Almost all its business units grew double digit.
Importantly, AI infrastructure revenue grew 243 per cent year on year.
The current layoffs mirror similar action taken by other tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft and Meta.
Last year, Microsoft cut over 15,000 roles globally.
Analyst in India believe that increasingly the tech layoffs have come closer home.
Pareekh Jain, founder of Pareekh Consulting and EIIRTrend, said most of these layoffs are being driven by the need for rationalisation due to AI and also the need to invest in AI hardware.
"If you see the earlier layoffs, the impact on India was minimal. But going forward, that will change.
"Last year across GCCs (global capability centres), the lay off number was around 10,000.
"If the Oracle media numbers are to be believed, this will be one of the highest layoffs at a GCC unit," he said.
Feature Presentation: Ashish Narsale/Rediff